How To Indie – When Two Developers Have the Same Idea

I was going to write a tutorial article about shader authoring in Unity this week. I’ll post that one in a couple of weeks, because I wanted to cover this topic first. Recently, some events have occurred that compelled me to write this article.

To help illustrate the point of this topic, I’m going to start with an example from another medium. Back in 2012, there was a movie called “The Raid”, and it was totally awesome. Two months later, a gritty reboot of Judge Dredd also released. It was also totally awesome, but it had the rotten luck of having an identical plot to The Raid. Both movies were exceptional, but only one of them made any money.

Because they were released so closely together, there was no way that their identical plots could have been the result of theft – it was a legitimately crazy coincidence. That said, with the two-month gap between their releases, coupled with the early announcement trailers that both movies had, the directors and producers of Dredd would have definitely had the time for a drastic course-correction. They could have scrapped the movie entirely, they could have buried it and made a quick cash-grab as a direct-to-DVD release, they could have delayed it and re-written it, they could have rushed their movie into cinemas before The Raid, or they could have tried to cobble together a different story by re-editing their footage. They did none of these things. They accepted the notable similarities, stayed true to their vision for the movie, and chose to release the best possible version of their product that they could make. The end result was a great movie that no one saw.

I mention this example from film because my experiences of the last few months have shown me how frequently this can happen in games.

Case in point, a few months ago, I wrote a little mobile game called The Ingenious Machine. It’s a puzzle game where the player makes Rube Goldberg machines out of cartoony-looking items (I got the idea from a physics book that I had a child). I did the due diligence before I started coding, I did a Google/YouTube search on “Rube Goldberg game”, and found a couple of cheap-and-cheerful Flash games and one Unity title. “Fair enough”, I said, “my idea wasn’t 100% original, but I had found a nice, small market to drop my game into”.

Two days before Ingenious shipped, I read a preview article where an internet commenter opined “This is just The Incredible Machine with different graphics”. I rushed to YouTube and searched for “Incredible Machine”, only to find that my idea was already a moderately well-known game from twenty years ago, and we even had similar-sounding titles. As with the Judge Dredd movie in my earlier example, it was too late to turn back at this point. Ingenious was already in certification at the App Store, money had already been spent on marketing, and I wasn’t going to delete all that work just because of an obscure twenty year old game, so I took the risk and released it anyway.

I got away with it on mobile, but the Steam Greenlight campaign that I started for the PC/Mac version quickly became brutal. Between that and the video comments on GameTrailers, almost every second piece of user feedback was an angry/sarcastic/accusatory comparison with Incredible Machine (“…this is crap…come back when you have a real game, until then, go home…it’s the Incredible Machine but worse…why is everything blue, can’t you make real graphics like the Incredible Machine does?”). Then to put a final nail in the coffin, it transpired that the original makers of Incredible Machine had released an updated version on Steam that surpassed mine in every way.

At the time, I took the learning experience for what it was. The PC/Mac version of Ingenious shipped on Desura, and at the time of writing has sold two units.

Whatever. By that point, I had already moved onto releasing Chaos Ride; a futuristic tunnel-racer where you control your speed by building momentum (imagine a cross between Wipeout, Ballistics, and thespecial stages from Sonic 2). Besides the obvious aforementioned inspirations, and similar hover-car games like Flashout or Extreme G, it was another original idea, and was considered as such as the game released episodically on mobile.

Feeling quite emboldened by the game’s critical success, I started working on a PC version with Oculus Rift support, and recently posted a work-in-progress video on YouTube. Eight hours later, this was waiting for me in the comments thread:

“So, you look at ‘Radial-G’ and change it so that your inside the tube instead of outside it. Wow…. Is this really what indie developers have been reduced to?”

I was aware of Radial G. I remembered watching the announcement trailer on Kotaku after I’d shipped episode 1 of Chaos Ride. Again, I did the due dilligence, did a Google/YouTube search about them, and found that Radial G’s Greenlight campaign started nearly two weeks after Chaos Ride’s first announcement. So from my perspective, I had the “idea” first, and I honestly thought nothing of it. Ostensibly, our games looked similar; cockpit-view hover-cars in a tunnel. But I was confident that I had enough to stand out as a unique product. The fundamental momentum-based gameplay, the art style, and the progression were all completely different, so at best, we just had similar themes.

In spite of this, I was branded a plagiarist by the audience because another dev team had more effective marketing than I did. Plus, to add insult to injury, the same troll who posted that comment was able to find an announcement article for Radial G that pre-dates mine, so I didn’t even have that high-ground to stand on.

So at the time of writing, I’m now in the same position as I was with Ingenious Machine. The PC version of Chaos Ride is still in development, but I can never actually release it because it would become flame-bait as soon as I would try to market or sell it. At the same time, I can’t just scrap it either, because money has already been spent on marketing and development, a lot of dev time has been spent, publisher meetings have been arranged, and frankly, the game is too awesome to die.

But this article is not intended as a rant. It’s intended as a comment on the potential prevalence of my situation. As I thought about it, I concluded that either I’m very unlucky, or unwittingly-similar games happen more often than we realise.

In the case of mobile, this phenomenon would tend to go unnoticed. Since the app stores are awash with deliberate clones anyway, people wouldn’t even bother to acknowledge two similar game ideas. Meanwhile in the AAA games industry, generating copycat products is expected to the point of being demanded by the market.

But given the indie gaming scene’s self-appointed status as the last bastion of innovation and originality, it’s no wonder that clones are more fervently chastised. Whether Chaos Ride is a clone of Radial G or not, it only became an issue worthy of comment when I ported it to Oculus Rift. The similarities between the Machines Ingenious and Incredible only became a point of ire when Ingenious moved to Steam Greenlight. The pattern is pretty obvious. Obviously, PC gamers don’t want to see Steam turn into the App Store, and so would naturally seek to defend against any instance where that appeared to be happening.

Normally, that would be enough to simply chalk up to experience and move on (i.e. be prepared to throw your work away if someone else with better marketing announces a similar product before you ship). But realistically, that won’t work for us as an industry, because this is only going to happen more often as the indie market grows.

I’ve written about over-saturation in past articles, but the more games that appear on the market, the higher the likelihood of unintentional clones. Using the App Store as a template, even if only 1% of its1197087 games were unwitting copies, that’s still nearly 12,000 well-intentioned games that would be dismissed for being similar to existing products.

The argument could therefore be made that the modern incarnation of indie gaming can no longer only be about innovation. When your development community spans dozens of developers, every game can be a unique snowflake. When it spans in the millions, it’s an unrealistic expectation.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s merely a sign of our industry’s growing maturity. As a point of comparison, almost all films and TV shows tend to follow the same handful of story structures, themes, and character arcs (there are even websites that catalogue them). For another example, entire sub-genres of music are built from existing tunes that share similar riffs or melodies.

With regards to how this approach affects games, both the AAA industry’s obsession with linear set-pieces, and the mobile industry’s obsession with deliberate clones, are extreme and immature examples of how other entertainment genres already work. But this could be the aspect of gaming where the indie market leads the way. If as an audience, we had the awareness not to tolerate plagiarism, and also the wisdom not to cry foul whenever two tunnel racers appear on the Oculus Rift within a fortnight of each other, everyone would ultimately benefit.